Thawing
by mysteryredhead
Summary: What on earth is Marie going to do in order to keep Logan warm when winter has set in and his joints are freezing up?


**Yes, another of the 'car-trip' oneshots. Driving in 40 degree (C) heat, my sister goes. "I wish it was snowing." And this was born. This has a ROGAN warning attached. Overdone, but I love it. This is slightly AU - John at mansion (I love him too much to leave him out) and Rouge can control her skin. Deal. 

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**

For my sister, Tess. We fight, but I still love you.

Enjoy.

Thawing

The day dawned bright, and very cold. The sun streamed through Marie's bedroom window, hitting her eyelids and shocking the girl into life.

Well, this is what Logan assumed; after all, the only thing he could hear was muffled swearing and curses. He ducked his head a little, slightly ashamed. He knew those curses came out of his head, because no good southern girl he'd ever met swore like that. _Not strictly true…_ his inner Wolverine interrupted _… there was that one in Anchorage… _Logan stopped himself and listened in to Marie moving about next door. Between taking the lord's name in vain and cursing somebody's mother, she was stumbling around, obviously trying to find a jumper.

"Stupid…bloody jumper…where the fuck…." then there was a thump and "shit, damn it Logan, I know you're listening! Get in here and help me find the goddamned jumper!" Then there was another thud, and a low groan.

_Busted. _

He sighed and got up. He knew that she knew. That was the thing with an adamantinum skeleton. If it got cold, or god-forbid… frozen, it took a _very_ long time to thaw, and he was pissed-off for most of that time – a lowered body temperature did that to him. Like hypothermia, but he couldn't die. Nobody else knew – they just thought that he didn't like the cold. Which was odd, in retrospect, because he had lived most of his 'remembered' years in Canada. _Cold_ Canada. But, he did always wear several layers; tank top, t-shirt, flannel, denim jacket, leather jacket etc, and that was just his top half.

He walked in to find Marie half sprawled across the bed, her head and assortment of blankets on the floor, long legs up in the air, black underwear showing, and a thick book on the floor close by. He decided that she tripped over the book and landed – mostly – on her bed. Judging by the glare she was currently giving said book upside down, he was right.

"Alright, up we get Marie." He went to haul her up, but then he faced a dilemma – where the fuck was he going to put his hand? On her nicely appealing ass, grab a slender foot, or just put his hands on her shoulders and hope for the best? The problem solved itself when she twisted around and noticed what he was wearing. Or lack thereof. She promptly fell on her head, and he _almost_ caught a flash of breast as her large t-shirt fell up, but she scrambled upright quickly.

"Logan!"

"What?"

"Have you lost your mind? You're not wearing _anything_!" (A/N: yum.)

"Marie! I'm wearing pants."

"You know what I mean, you've got to be cooling down already! Shit! What do I do? What do I do? Ummm… aaahh…" She was jerking nervously.

Time was of the essence here. Once Logan was in the cool air, he cooled very quickly and he's be irritable for days after while he warmed up. Time! Time! Why did he come in with no clothes on? Why did he even get out of bed? Bed! That's it!

"Aha! BED!" with that, she threw herself at Logan, who instinctively tried to catch her, so they overbalanced and fell onto her bed.

"Maire! What?" But he couldn't even see her, she was a blur of movent at the foot of the bed, having somehow already spun around, and she was grabbing as many blankets and pillows, and – was that a bra? – clothing items as she could reach, and throwing them on top of him.

Well, he was happy when the bra landed on his face.

Soon he was covered in a pile of cloth with occasional underwire a foot high. Unexpectedly, he felt movement at his feet, and he realised Marie was worming her way up next to him. She snuggled against his side, her warm body keeping the ice away – for the minute.

"Ok Marie. What. Was. That? "

"That was me keeping you happy – and warm – for the next three days. You should be thanking me."

_I know what we could do to keep warm…_ Inner Wolverine smirked and raised _the_ eyebrow suggestively.

_No._

"Thanks, shall we see how this goes?"

"Yeah…"she was already drifting off.

_Being cuddled up next to us will do that to her – the girl is totally smitten with us. I know it. You know it. We want it._

Logan didn't respond.

-

When he woke again he was warm… blissfully warm. He glanced over to Marie, who was sleeping soundly next to him, and then over her head at the alarm clock. It was three o'clock already! He stood up and walked over to the window. Down below he could see the kids of the mansion having some kind of snow fight. It was all vs. The Drake Kid, and Popsicle was winning. Of course. He was fighting a one-man war, commanding his element and soaking the others.

"Ha! Take that John!"

"Die, Icedick!"

"You're going down Jubilee!"

While 'Iceman' was distracted by revenge on the girl in yellow (really, it did nothing to help camouflage her – as if her voice wasn't loud enough already) the Half-Pint phased up behind him and stuffed a handful of snow down his shirt. It didn't do anything to him, but it proved a point to Logan, and he shook his head in disappointment. Drake was gonna pay for that lapse in focus during Logan's next Danger Room session. The whining kids were always saying he was obsessed with watching his back, but they really should listen to him more often.

"Good job Half-Pint!" Logan yelled down from the window. Bobby spun around to face him.

"What the hell are you doing in Rouge's room, Weasel?" Big mistake. That icicle may have been in the heat of the battle, and Marie's ex, but _nobody_ called him Weasel.

_Kill 'im._

The claws came out, and now Logan was deadly quiet. The others started backing away, as quietly as they could, and had Logan not been about to kill one of their fellow teens, he may have been a little proud of them, because he could hardly hear them, even with the snow crunching under their boots.

"What was that, Freezer Burn?"

Freezer Burn reacted instinctively, sending a very large pile of snow up to slam into Logan's torso, and then another, which Bobby solidified into a wall of ice – his best defence. Then he turned tail and ran, literally for his life.

-

Marie was woken by Logan's yell of praise to Kitty, and she sat up from under the pile of clothes and blankets to watch. When the silence fell, she began hurriedly trying to untangle herself from the pile, but somehow there were pantyhose and knitted jumpers twisted around her ankles, and they did _not_ want to come off.

She was just getting the last of them off when the wall of snow hit Logan. She fell off the bed for the second time that day, and ran over to him.

"Shit!" She was still half asleep, and her brain was not yet functioning at full capacity.

She needed some sort of stopgap solution, at least till her brain woke up. She couldn't move him to the bed… but she could move the stuff on it! Marie turned and pulled up the pile of…well, what can only be described as 'stuff'. The stuff fell from her arms onto Logan, and only his feet could be seen – but they had not stopped shivering. She knew she had only slowed the cooling process, that the cold was still seeping into him. How to warm him up? Her brain was speeding up, and the memory bank was up and running. She thought back to when she had first realised what was going on. She hadn't told anyone, because so far as she knew, she was the only one who did know, and it was his lone weakness. It would be really bad if all the bad guys suddenly decided to fight their battles and lair it up in Siberia.

-

_She had watched them return from their recent mission to the Yukon Territory of Canada. She noticed how he was walking stiffly, and the customary bluntness seemed to have degenerated into mere grunts. She saw the others plod wearily off to the med-bay for the usual post-mission check up. He, of course, didn't need medical attention, so none of them really cared when he didn't go with them. They all assumed he went straight to his room like the last ten times. He didn't._

_She saw his stagger over to the bench just inside the hanger and saw him… drop, onto it. Odd. He usually did go straight to his room. When he hadn't moved for ten minutes she quietly slid round the corner she had been hiding behind and approached. He just sat there, and barely lifted his head._

_"Logan?"_

_Grunt._

_"You 'right?"_

_Grunt._

_Okay then… not alright. She wondered what was the matter, and she sat there with him, trying to figure it out, until she saw a small icicle hanging off the tail of the Blackbird. It clicked._

_"Logan, grunt if you can't move because your joints have all stiffened up because of the cold."_

_Silence, then… grunt._

_"Right then." Marie pondered for a minute, then decided. "We have to warm you up. There's no knowing how long it'll take if you don't do anything."_

_Grunt._

_She stood and pulled him up – it took all her strength to do so. Then he was locked in a standing position, his joints frozen completely, and he was definitely unable to walk._

_"Okay then…umm…" she wondered how on earth she was going to move him, when she remembered the Blackbird's service trolley. A metal cart with wheels at the opposite end of the hanger. Perfect! "Right, stay he- Oh." She giggled apologetically, then ran to the trolley and spun it around, gleefully allowing Scott's tools to fly off. She pushed the rest onto the ground, smiling slightly, and pushed it over to him. She positioned it carefully in front of him and then said; "Forgive me." Logan was till tyring to figure out what the hell she was planning on doing, when she pushed all of her body weight into his upper back, and he fell forward, right onto the trolley. Then he got it._

_Gruntgruntgruntgruntgrunt._

_"Oh shut up. I'm helping you."_

_He fell silent, and she stealthily pushed him out of the hanger and down the hall towards the shower rooms. They had just about made it, with some promise-filled grunts along the way, when Marie stopped._

_Men's, or Women's?_

_Logan was still facing the ground, so he couldn't tell why she stopped. Marie decided that being pushed down the hall on a metal trolley by a seventeen year old wasn't helping his ego any, and she walked calmly into the men's room, not willing to emasculate him any further. She strode purposefully to the tiled shower room and stepped in, pulling the trolley behind her. She pushed it to the furthest corner of the room and stopped. How to get him off the damned thing? She couldn't lift him, so she reverted to simple physics. She crouched and lifted at the furthest base of the trolley. He rolled off and smacked into the white floor – very hard._

_"Sorry"_

_Grunt._

_"I'm just gonna turn the water on hot and leave you here."_

_Grunt._

_She could decipher that one easily enough._

_"Why, Logan? Because as I'm_ sure _you've noticed, I happen to be wearing my favourite white top. Enough said. Come say hi when you've thawed." With that she turned the water on scalding and directed the stream of water so that it hit his torso first. Shoulders could move arms, which could manoeuvre the body, and the ribs might move easier too. Then she walked out._

-

"The shower! Logan, Quick!" He understood, and lurched up quickly, staggering into her bathroom and turning the shower on hot.

"Ahh…" he sighed, satisfied.

Maire shut the door on him when she heard the slap of wet clothing hitting the ground, and turned to her messy room, trying not to picture naked Logan, and failing miserably. Then she saw it. The ice creeping under the crack of the door, she heard the creaking of the wood.

"BOBBY!" They were snowed in. the little prick had iced them in so that Loan couldn't kill him. He had forgotten about Marie, and now; she was going to kill him too.

"What? What is it?" Marie turned, and froze. Logan had heard her scream and come running out to recuse her, regardless of the fact he had no clothes on, and was… dripping… with… water.

"Oh…" Marie blushed like mad, and then pulled herself together. She was eighteen now, had only loved Logan since she'd met him, and one minute ago she'd been picturing him naked.

"Ah, Marie, I'm sorry…" he turned to go back into the bathroom.

Marie wasn't sure what took hold of her. "Don't be."

He froze, and looked over his shoulder at her. "What?"

"Are you still cold? I can think of something we can do to warm you up…" She took off her shirt.

He was speechless as she pushed him into the bathroom and shut the door after her, leaving her t-shit behind them.


End file.
